Go looking for them wherever you think they might gather or hang out (online or in person). Reach out to those who seem like a good fit and ask them about the problem(s) they’re having that your product solves. Once you know if your product would actually solve it well for them, tell them about it in earnest.
If you’re doing that honestly, where they really have that problem and you actually have a good solution, you’d be a jerk not to lightly pitch it at that point.
You could probably do that up to 100 or so customers reasonably easily.
Good advice. Do you think the part of point two about building every feature request might be a bit risky for some solo folks?
It’s easy to get carried away building every request, especially with early adopters who likely aren’t actually invested yet but may be excited about their own vision for it.
My personal experience is that too much of it leads to the product becoming a sort of shapeless, unwieldy ooze. Or perfect for one customer and few others. Some things can be tough to undo later too, so you might end up supporting them a lot longer than you’d like.
I agree there needs to be a way to fit it into the overall product direction. Solving these on a case-by-case basis is important and part of the job.
When I first started, getting customer reviews was my north star, so i would add any feature and hide them under "advanced" if they were ridiculously long-tail. Still worth it for the review and positive experience even if you hide the feature...
It makes connecting user domains to your app easy and reliable at any scale. Each Approximated user gets the own globally distributed, managed cluster of servers with its own dedicated IPv4 address. Includes (unlimited) edge rule features, DDoS protection, webhooks, and more. Make a simple API call, tell the user to point an A record at the IP, and it’s connected to your app with its own SSL certificates.
Built/building with elixir and phoenix, which has been fantastic.
We can also invert that by asking: does a student become smarter by writing their essay on their own?
I would argue that the answer to questions is no. It depends on how you define “smarter”, though. You would likely gain knowledge writing the essay yourself, but is gaining knowledge equivalent to getting smarter?
If so, you could also just read the essay afterwards and gain the same knowledge. Is _that_ smarter? You’ve now reached the same benefit for much less work.
I think fundamentally I at least partially agree with your stance. That we should think carefully before taking a seemingly easier path. Weighing what we gain and lose. Sometimes the juice is, in fact, the squeeze. But it’s far from cut and dry.
It's also entirely possible, maybe even likely, for people to get burnt out doing something they love because we don't set the natural boundaries we would with something we're strictly doing pragmatically.
I still think it's the best way to live, but the saying "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" really is double edged.
https://approximated.app - reliably automating custom domains and their SSL certs at scale. For SaaS, marketplaces, platforms, outbound services, etc. who have a lot of customers that want to connect their own domains.
Currently working on:
- Further improving the embeddable DNS widget (to help/automate users updating their DNS records) that launched last month
- Rolling out the new hybrid self hosted version that allows traffic and certs to only go through your servers, while getting the full benefit of the cloud version
- Tinkering with some AI ideas for improving the existing WAF features (tricky, but potentially powerful)
- Making Edge Sequences (pattern matching and rules applied at the edge) more flexible and powerful with more composable options and ways to match requests
Recently hit a milestone of over a million domains served!
While I agree that would be great for many people, how are 99% of young people supposed to survive during this time? How do they pay their rent, buy groceries, and pay for these explorations without wage work?
In fact driving a 4x4 from Alaska to Argentina only cost me the same as it did to live in a city and go to work everyday ~$1200 per month for everything
Configurable warnings as webhooks would be pretty cool. Then I can automate whatever needs to happen on my side.
I already automate apps, machines, etc with the machines API and GraphQL, so my big worries in this area are:
- Woops, some bad logic deployed too many machines (sounds like this policy helps)
- Some kind of mistake or attack that just explodes bandwidth usage suddenly
https://approximated.app - reliably automating custom domains and their SSL certs at scale. For SaaS, marketplaces, platforms, outbound services, etc. who have a lot of domains to manage.
Coming up on a million domains served, it's been a fun ride!
reply